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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

title: Why you can’t cash out pt 3: Bitcoin is not a Ponzi! It just works like one

but if you're cashing out, doesn't that mean you already made your money? cashing out is completely orthogonal to actually making money. at least your first two posts were at least vaguely related to "cashing out" .

>This makes Bitcoin a zero-sum investment

>This is, again, why “market cap” is a misleading and useless number. If someone bought a fraction of a bitcoin at $19,000 per BTC, that doesn’t make anyone else a “Bitcoin billionaire” whose bitcoins could be sold at $19,000 each — the total actual money recoverable from the system hasn’t gone up.

so basically, just like any asset?

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You shouldn't expect not to be the bag holder; statistically, you will. Most people are simply not going to be able to cash out at anything other than a massive loss, and this is important and worth saying.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I'm failing to see what's unclear about this ...

> so basically, just like any asset?

The difference being that if you buy all of a stock, you've bought a company, an enterprise that exists. Also, non-penny-stocks tend to have rather fatter order books than any crypto (even Bitcoin).

Think of it like this: what was the market cap of Beanie Babies in July 1999? Let's keep it to "investment grade" Beanies, per the jargon Beanie speculators were using. Where did all that value go?? Answer: nowhere, it was illusory.

sorry, asset isn't the right word here. "commodities" (ie. goods) is a better description.

The money doesn't go up with traditional goods, but the total value in the system does.

This is easier to understand if you think about a specific traditional commodity, say timber futures. A timber future is created by some arborist who has some trees to sell, and will hopefully be ultimately purchased (after probably passing through a few investors' hands) by someone who has need of trees, like a sawmill operator.

But here's the magic bit: the same tree is worth more to the sawmill operator than it is to the arborist. Because she owns a sawmill, she can make finished boards from the tree which she can then sell at a profit. The arborist, who lacks a sawmill, can't take advantage of that opportunity. So there is some range of prices for a tree where the arborist and the sawmill operator will both think, correctly, that they benefited from the deal. By moving the same tree from someone who can't make further use of it to someone who can, the total value has gone up. And as long as the price of the future remains in that magic range, any number of middlemen can skim some off in between and everyone still wins.

Bitcoin doesn't work like that. There's nothing one can do with a bitcoin other than sell it, so there's no two parties who will mutually benefit from an exchange at any price. If two people disagree about the value they, personally, can extract from a fixed amount of BTC they can't both be right. They may disagree about their predictions or their risk appetite. But there's no sale of Bitcoins that both parties can look back on with perfect hindsight and agree that they both benefited.

> If two people disagree about the value they, personally, can extract from a fixed amount of BTC they can't both be right.

This is a absolutely not true if either party has outside opportunities (including the “opportunity” to avoid a unique personal disutility) not available to the other party; sure, all you can do with a Bitcoin is exchange it for other goods/services, but the goods/services A can exchange it for may not be the same that B can exchange it for. And even if they are, the utilities each party attaches to those things may not be the same.

yep. I literally explain this in the article, and I also link the relevant Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_flow_of_income

But it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his HODLing depends upon his not understanding it.

Beanie Babies in 1999 are as good an example - I think they're a much more comparable example than any "commodities".

If I pay $1000 for a particular Beanie, that doesn't mean someone with 1000 Beanies should expect the book value of their holding can be realised.

I'm saying that Bitcoins in a bubble work much the same way. That is, not like "any asset", but like any speculative investment in the mania phase of a huge asset bubble.

It feels like you're going out of your way to try not to understand this ...

>Beanie Babies in 1999 are as good an example - I think they're a much more comparable example than any "commodities".

I'm guessing you think that's the case because you think bitcoin has no utility? Because basically that's all it boils down to. Gold checks off all your is a ponzi boxes (even the fanatical promoters, if you consider preppers/gold standard types). You can argue that gold has intrinsic value but a quick check shows that the majority of gold demand is either for hoarding or for jewelry (status symbols, no puropose except to be expensive).

>If I pay $1000 for a particular Beanie, that doesn't mean someone with 1000 Beanies should expect the book value of their holding can be realised.

If amazon has a market cap of $x, and bezos owns 50%, he shouldn't expect to get $x*0.5 from dumping all his holdings. This is a phenomenon in every asset.

As I already said to you, a few posts up:

> Also, non-penny-stocks tend to have rather fatter order books than any crypto (even Bitcoin).

The claimed utility of bitcoin is an open question at best. Blockchains have shown no use cases to date other than cryptocurrencies (I went and looked).

Literally the only reason anyone is talking about Bitcoin in 2017 is "number go up". If not for that, it would be in the Hilarious Disasters section of the Museum of Failed Technologies That Were Interesting But Not Actually Useful. The reason for "number go up" is not utility, except insofar as marketing claims that - it's pure mania phase speculation fueled by hype over "number go up". This lasts until the headless Ponzi runs out of n00bs.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his HODLing depends upon his not understanding it.

>As I already said to you, a few posts up:

>>Also, non-penny-stocks tend to have rather fatter order books than any crypto (even Bitcoin).

because that's irrelevant to the discussion. bitcoin's value isn't derived from being a equity in a company or having a fat orderbook on exchanges (although the latter certainly helps sustain its price), not to mention I don't have a bloomberg terminal, so I couldn't easily verify that fact.

>The claimed utility of bitcoin is an open question at best. Blockchains have shown no use cases to date other than cryptocurrencies (I went and looked).

"The claimed utility of the internet is an open question at best. the internet have shown no use cases to date other than transferring information(I went and looked)."

>It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his HODLing depends upon his not understanding it.

that doesn't even make sense. the idea behind the original form was that the man was deriving some material benefit (a paycheck) from being willfully ignorant. in this case, the man is deriving... "HODLing"?

> "The claimed utility of the internet is an open question at best. the internet have shown no use cases to date other than transferring information(I went and looked)."

Maybe if you'd asked that question in the 1970s. By the late 90s dotcom bubble, the internet was proven technology being used for many practical purposes: in research, government, and just hobbyists (ever hear of a site called "Geocities?"). Some of applications had even proved to be commercially successful, such as Ebay.

These early applications weren't ponzi schemes. Most people making geocities home pages weren't investing in anything, and most of those that were were using it as a legitimate way to market something real.

There's nothing like that for blockchain. Almost all of the proposed applications are hypothetical and used only by blockchain promoters primarily interested in pumping the value of their investment.

I agree gold lacks the fundamental uses as a commodity when compared with things like oil.

But this is because gold is pretty close to being a currency. For hundreds of years, gold and silver was actual currency.

It is physical, finite and well established. Gold is a well accepted standard.

All "money" in the loosest sense of the word is a medium by which we can avoid swapping labour. If you grow apples and i make shoes, we can swap apples for shoes, but if you dont need 400 pairs of shoes, you need to find some way to swap them for things you do want.

Hence we all agree that these little tokens will be what we use, so we can create much more complex trading arrangements. Gold is a currency because almost everybody agrees that is one way to transfer value around. And even those that dont, trust the international monetary system which will swap gold directly into whichever token your country uses at a fair rate.

Bitcoin is worse off than gold because a) it isnt a physical entity. Gold is safe because it is the original incorruptible currency. I cannot just make gold. Bitcoin is a digital protocol, so it changes. Gold doesnt fork, for example. It has overwhelmingly stronger guarentees of longevity.

B) only a few people believe it is useful for exchange. Close to 7 billion people believe that gold is a viable currency. To get bitcoin to be accepted widely enough to be seen in the same light as gold likely requires hundreds of years, with opportunity for disaster at every step. We are talking about changes in attitude on the order of launching a new religion.

beanie babies did not include an important innovation. i wonder how people can make this unfortunate comparison

The innovation doesnt matter. For something to have fundamental value, there has to be some mechanism by which that value can be realized.

With fiat currency, that mechanism is that I can easily and quickly exchange it for practically any service offered by pretty much anybody in the whole world, and that is backed by governments and large stable infrastructure.

All money is just a medium to exchange work between people, rather than a trade and barter economy which is inefficient.

Any current uses of bitcoin do not show it is a currency. I can probably convince a lot of people (especially in 3rd world countries) to accept things like cigarettes as payment. Heck, I could probably convince a lot of tradespeople to accept a car or some other valuable item in payment. None of these are ever going to be currency. Just like these, bitcoin lacks the fundamental advantages that were behind the adoption of money in the first place, so its extreme to suggest this is a realistic outcome.

As an asset, bitcoin has no tie to anything of tangible value. A stock is ownership of a portion of an operational company. You get a cut of all future profits. There is an anchor to some real world value. The reason google isnt worth 1c a share, is because you could buy the stock and receive a share of the profit. If the market suddenly went crazy, and drove google down to 1c for no reason at all and kept it there for the rest of time, its (hypothetically) no issue for you. You still receive the same % of profits and you laugh all the way to the bank.

Apply the same test to bitcoin. If the price went to 1c tomorrow and stayed their for the rest of time, how would you earn back your 19k usd per bitcoin? You couldnt.

And the commodity argument is even weaker - commodities trade because they have a use. Sugar, pork belly, wheat, oil etc. All have much more trade based on requirements of the underlying than speculation. These are staples of human activity. Suggesting bitcoin has any fundamental end use that outweighs speculation is just crazy.

> With fiat currency, that mechanism is that I can easily and quickly exchange it for practically any service offered by pretty much anybody in the whole world, and that is backed by governments and large stable infrastructure.

That is precisely what makes Bitcoin so attractive.

Governments and central banks are losing trust by increasing the monetary base significantly over the last years. The real bubble is in commercial bank and central bank money, combined with zero interest rates (artificial price manipulation of savings).

Bitcoin can quickly and easily be exchanged for practically any service in the world.

Within the next months, we will see a change of unit of account to Bits (1 million bits = 1 Bitcoin). This will make using Bitcoin in every day transactions much easier.

The large stable infrastructure is built as we speak. Compare it to how the Internet was slow and clumsy in 1995: nobody could imagine streaming movies at that time. Now it's reality.

> As an asset, bitcoin has no tie to anything of tangible value.

That's precisely what makes Bitcoin so attractive as money and Google shares so unattractive as money.

If somebody would pay for your services in Google shares, you would first have to do an in-depth research of the underlying value of the share before accepting it as payment.

just because you mentioned Africa, cryptocurrency properties make bitcoin trading in oppressed regimes at 40% premium. just as you said bartering needs some currency bitcoin can provide that worldwide bettering the infrastructure and diminishing oppression. if we are talking high fees and speed im with you and believe other cryptocurrencies are better.

Do you have any actual evidence of that? Sounds like an even more implausible scenario than the Venezuela one that turned out to be just endless hype.

this is typical of Bitcoin advocacy - arguments are abbreviated to dropping a few words that allude to the concept of an actual argument - a refutation by vague reference. Answering these is annoying, because it pretty much requires you to make their argument for them.

In this case I think the thing he's alluding to is when bitcoins were "$13,000" in Zimbabwe but $9,000 elsewhere.

What was happening was that this was the price in the local USD-substitute currency, which traded at a 40% discount to actual dollars:

“This new currency was supposed to be fully convertible into U.S. dollars, a promise that has proven to be illusory. It has since slipped to a large discount to the dollar. So when Zimbabweans buy bitcoin for $13800 — they aren’t paying with U.S. dollars, they are paying with this new unit … In Zimbabwe, the market exchange rate is set unofficially, on street corners and such. Without an on-the-ground data gathering network to canvas street corners, an outside observer can get a decent proxy for the exchange rate by gathering bitcoin prices on the internet.”

https://jpkoning.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/zimbabwe-and-hyperbi...

you can check prices live and read articles about Zimbabwe and other countries

They haven't done proper research. There are various reasons to like and not to like crypto. Prices might have probably gotten ahead of themselves, but they do have value.

Here is one example for store of value: how much wealth is held offshore globally? Around $32tn. Why is this held offshore? The wealthy want money secured abroad that can't be easily seized by any government -- especially if you have interests around the globe. You don't put all of your eggs in one basket.

Oh wait, that sort of sounds like a perfect use case for crypto.

Do you actually believe that there is some set of bank vaults out there in random islands and offshore principalities that are stuffed full of $32tn in cash and gold? No, the money leaves those offshore locations just as soon as it arrives and returns to places like the US and Europe to be invested in conventional assets that can appreciate in value or return dividends. The money is only secured by the willingness of the offshore entities to hide its ownership, it is not actually in those countries.

for me, anyone who understand Bitcoin as "investment" is a sucker. The value of bitcoin is orthogonal to it's function as digital cash system. If Bitcoin drops to 0.001 we can still use it to make transactions in software.

My prediction is that atomic swaps and lightning networks will reinforce the position of Bitcoin as a technology tool and crypto "Investors" will have wasted lots of money and time watching stupid graphs and "market caps" when the price adjusts to the real cost of mining and securing the coins.

What is the "real" cost of mining? The way Bitcoin is set up, the cost of mining is proportional to the security of the network from a 51% attack. However, there is no force that anchors this cost to the actual level of security needed; so the cost of mining could become arbitrarily high; and all we would have to show for it is an unnecessarily secure network. The block rewards also provide a lower bound for the (Bitcoin denominated) cost of mining and (until they resolve the congestion issues), the auction based transaction fees add to this lower bound.

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